Turkey anyone?

If Bernard Mathews famous "bootiful" "Norfolk" turkey business survives this bird flu outbreak it will be more by luck than judgement. I put Norfolk in quotes because it's come out that a lot of his turkey meat is shipped in, partly processed, from Hungary. Not exactly a marketing department's wet dream that, is it?

A representative from Mathews' farms was on the radio last Friday defending the company. The outbreak was originally said to have been contained in one shed. Later it emerged that the H5N1 infection had spread to two other sheds. "Doesn't say much for your bio-security measures, does it?" John Humphrys of BBC Radio 4's Today programme asked.

Well John, as anyone who has worked in industry could tell you, what's written down in the process manual often bears absolutely no relation to what really happens. Processes rely on people, and people will do whatever seems expedient to give themselves an easy life, unless they are incentivised to behave differently. That incentive can be money, comfort, supervision, threat (of loss of earnings, face, or job), kudos, whatever, but there has to be one. It's no good for it to simply be written in a process manual.

If the process is that boots are scrubbed with disinfectant, and that chemical has to be lugged in 50-litre drums from a store on the other side of the compound, then one day, when the juice has run out, someone will think "hey, I can't be arsed to fetch another drum. One day without scrubbing my boots can't hurt." And they move from one shed to another with no scrubbing. And nothing awful happens - no-one even notices, and no-one fetches more juice. So there's no boot scrubbing the next day, and still nothing bad starts up. Pretty soon everyone is leaving their boots unscrubbed and nothing ever comes of it. If it goes on long enough, old workers might even start to say to new hands "oh, yeah, it says in the manual we're supposed to scrub our boots, but you don't need to bother with all that hassle. It's not necessary."

And then one day, H5N1 turns up and all hell breaks loose. If they had been scrubbing their boots like they should have, it would have been kept to a single shed, but instead it's all over the shop.

There's a famous piece of research often quoted on t'Interweb (usually in the context of managers' behaviour). It goes like this: You put eight monkeys in a cage, with a bunch of bananas suspended from a hook on the top of the cage. You place a ladder so that the monkeys can easily climb up to the bananas. Then every time any monkey tries to reach the bananas, you turn on a sprinkler and drench all the monkeys with ice-cold water. Pretty soon the brightest monkeys will cotton on that the water is connected to attempts to get to the bananas, and they will stop any monkey who starts up the ladder. The really dimmest monkeys will carry on trying for a while, but more and more monkeys will join in to stop them, until all the monkeys in the cage have learned that to climb the ladder is a Bad Thing.

At this point, you take one of the original monkeys out of the cage and replace it with a new monkey. This monkey will see the bananas and attempt to climb the ladder. The other seven monkeys will scream and yell, and drag the new monkey off the ladder before the water starts up. For a short time, depending on how bright it is, the new monkey will continue trying to get to the bananas, but eventually it will give up, knowing that it will be set upon every time it tries. Once it's learned this lesson, the process can be repeated, replacing another of the original monkeys.

Eventually, the cage will be completely populated with monkeys who have NEVER been drenched with water, but who will all scrabble and fight to prevent any new monkey from reaching the bananas, and will never try to use the ladder themselves. They don't know why, it's just "the way things are done around here." Learned behaviour. Disincentives (or, in enlightened societies, incentives). The answer to Bernard Mathews' prayers.